In 1936, the fledgling Social Security Board sent a document to millions of Americans that read (from Chapter 9 of Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man): There is now a law in this country which will give about 26 million people something to live on when they are old and have stopped working. … (the government […]
Daily Archive for February 22nd, 2011
Counties Don’t Die
Posted in Macroeconomics on Feb 22nd, 2011
The headline to this article is irritating: Census estimates show 1 in 4 counties is “dying.” This is ridiculous. We belabor the point here that counties and corporations and states and countries and churches, etc. are not living, breathing entities. And the continual anthropormophizing of such structures is not just a harmless verbal tendency. By […]
Policy Proposal, A Continuing Series
Posted in Politics on Feb 22nd, 2011
In this installment, I offer up for our governments a simple economic lesson in the incentive effects of taxation. It is well understood that taxes distort economic activity by driving a wedge between the value consumers would be able to obtain from a good and the cost that producers incur to make a good (maybe […]
